Quote from: jrientsFor a long time I've wanted to start a campaign with "The gates of the city give way and ten thousand orcs start pouring into the streets.  What do you do?"

:eek:

I would SO play in that game.... I'm going to steal the hell out of that.

Quote from: Dominus NoxOk, pundy, here's one I like:

A SF setting, either hard sf or space opera, that opens centuries or so after "the big crash" in which the grand republic/empire/federation/whatever fell and a great dark age came across the galaxy.

The players, struggling to survive, find an ancient warship from the great times fully operational and realize it gives them the power to rebuild civillization.

Good one. I had one that had the players awakening from cold-sleep in a barely-function underground facility with no memory of who they were, where they were, or anything. I made the characters and revealed bits of their information and skills to them as they stumbled upon them. The only way to do the whole "amnesia" angle in my opinion is to keep the character sheets to yourself.

Quote from: WerekoalaGood one. I had one that had the players awakening from cold-sleep in a barely-function underground facility with no memory of who they were, where they were, or anything. I made the characters and revealed bits of their information and skills to them as they stumbled upon them. The only way to do the whole "amnesia" angle in my opinion is to keep the character sheets to yourself.

Hmmm, ever hear of "The morrow project"? It might be one you'd like, look it up.

One of the openings I took the most pride in was for what would become a long-running fantasy campaign where the PCs began as students at university, and were rummaging in some old unsorted scrolls as a favor for a master when God appeared before them and begged them, pleaded with them: please find a way to kill me.

That was the first 60 seconds of the campaign. My favorite of the many initial responses was the wide eyes and pained, worried expresison of a player named Bob, who had chosen this particular campaign to finally play his very first cleric.

The next three years was the resulting avalanche that Bob (and many of us) would come to consider the best campaign we'd ever done

So, in terms of method: I like to kick it off with a grabber!

(And what a very appropriate way to introduce my new SIG file)

Quote from: Dominus NoxHmmm, ever hear of "The morrow project"? It might be one you'd like, look it up.

Yeah, the idea was kind of a GURPS homage to Morrow projtect, Aftermath, all the oldies but goodies. I just added the amneisa-cant-see-character-sheet angle.

Quote from: S. John RossMy favorite of the many initial responses was the wide eyes and pained, worried expresison of a player named Bob, who had chosen this particular campaign to finally play his very first cleric.

That's... that's evil.


I love it! :devil:

Quote from: JongWKThat's... that's evil.


I love it! :devil:

[nods]

Three years later, Bob is the one who got to finish the job, to push the knife in, so to speak. What an evening ...

The longest/best campaign I've run (Earthdawn) started aboard an airship as airpirate grappeling chains  dropped from above and latched onto the deck. The pcs were the only ones to survive the resulting crash, and they were in the middle of a vast wasteland. I've also done themore conventional desert island shipwreck. In my most recent game, I had one player, within the the first minute of the game he was kidnapped by Nazis who thought he was someone else. He woke tied to a chair. Afterwhich he was asked a lot of questions by some unfriendly people with a lot of sharp stuff. He was pretty motivated to kick some ass after that.

I'm a big fan of starting games "in media res."  That said, one of my favorite openings was a D&D campaign I ran.  I got tired of having the characters meeting "in a tavern" where a fight breaks out, so I just said, "okay, you all know each other.  You're all walking down the street.  As you're all passing the Bent Nail Tavern, Gruff the fighter (I roll a hit) gets hit on the side of his head by a flying tankard.  Everyone make Dex rolls to avoid the two guys crashing through the door of the tavern."
 
-SJ

Quote from: Paka"Why are we chasing this guy?"

"He killed your thief."

I hereby take this campaign kicker in a manly fashion, because I less-than-three it with all my soul.

Or, uh, my loins.  I dunno.  Still manly though.

I had all the (Good, Neutral-aligned) PCs magically summoned to the lair of Pox the Lich (rider of Saurglyce, the White Dracolich). He had some evil that needed to be done, but he was knee-deep in research right now and couldn't get away from the lab. The PCs had a choice:

Accept his Mark, which would allow him to know where the PCs were, and to scry on them whenever he wished so he knew what they were up to (and also let the PCs ask 1 question of him each day), becoming his servants, or-

he'd kill them. Then, presumably animate them and send their zombies along with the party anyway.

The PCs all accepted the Mark, becoming the HAND OF POX. The theme behind the campaign was they had to find a way to get rid of the Mark (which Pox could cast thru remotely, as if they were all his Familiars, so he could Chill Touch or Finger of Death them whenever he felt like it if they tried to betray him) knowing that once they were free of the Mark, Pox (20th level) would come after them.

Sadly, that campaign only went a couple sessions.

*****

Another one I liked is BORN YESTERDAY, I've done it twice so far for my Gamma World campaigns. The PCs are revived, usually from Cryogenic Suspension, naked, with no memory of how they got there, to find the world is...very different.